Is U.S.-China Cooperation on COVID-19 Still Possible?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Julian B. Gewirtz, Deborah Seligsohn & more on March 28, 2020

Over the past two weeks, as the outbreak of the virus known has COVID-19 has accelerated its deadly spread around the world, an already collapsing U.S.-China relationship appears to be entering a period of free fall. This is happening at a moment when the U.S. desperately needs China’s help stemming the tide of infection and when other countries might benefit from the world’s leading powers acting in coordination to fight the pandemic and the global economic disaster following in its wake. That seems unlikely to occur given the current state of hostility and mutual recrimination over the origin of the virus. On March 26, President Donald Trump spoke by phone with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to discuss a response to the outbreak. What concrete steps should U.S. policymakers take in the near term to create opportunities for coordination in responding to the global crisis? Is there reason to hope cooperation with China is still possible, or does the current rupture in the relationship represent an irreconcilable shift in the global order?

The Flowers Blooming in the Dark

By Ian Johnson on March 26, 2020

It’s possible to identify another period that might surpass the 1980s as China’s most open: a 10-year stretch beginning around the turn of this century, when a rich debate erupted over what lay ahead. As in the past, many of those speaking out were establishment intellectuals who were careful not to challenge too directly the Communist Party’s right to rule but took advantage of the relatively relaxed social policies championed by Deng’s successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, to launch a sophisticated discussion about how China should be run and its place in the world.

Vernacular Industrialism in China

By Eugenia Lean on March 24, 2020

Columbia University Press: In early 20th-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters, captain of industry, magazine editor, and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early 20th-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the 21st century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Lavender Au

on March 24, 2020

Lavender Au is a writer from London currently based in Beijing. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Times, and Vogue. She studied Mandarin at Tsinghua University and is a graduate of the University of Oxford.

Eugenia Lean

on March 23, 2020

Eugenia Lean is a Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (University of California Press, 2007), which examines a sensational crime of female passion to document the political role of sentiment in the making of a critical urban public. In 2004-2005, Lean received the ACLS/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Junior Faculty and the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Fairbank Center at Harvard University to research and complete the book project. This book was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, given by the American Historical Association. Her second book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the manufacturing, commercial, and cultural activities of maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940). It illustrates how lettered men of early 20th century China engaged in “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues that drew on the process of experimentation with both local and global practices of manufacturing, and was marked by heterogeneous, often ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. She has received support for the project with the Charles A. Ryskamp (ACLS) award in 2010-2011 and a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies, a National Endowment of the Humanities grant, and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation fellowship in 2017-2018. A third book project focuses on China’s involvement in shaping 20th-century global regimes of intellectual property rights from trademark infringement to patenting science. It investigates the local vibrant cultures of copying and authenticating in China, as well as enquiries into how China emerged as a “quintessential copycat” in the modern world.

Lean received her B.A .from Stanford (1990) and her M.A. and Ph.D. (1996, 2001) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was featured in “Top Young Historians,” History News Network (fall 2008), and received the 2013-2014 Faculty Mentoring Award for faculty in Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is currently the Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

‘I Feel Like I Am Committing Crimes’

A Q&A with Legal Rights Advocate Yang Zhanqing

By Elaine Lu on March 23, 2020

On July 22 last year, three activists from the public interest NGO Changsha Funeng were detained and later formally arrested for “subversion of state power.” Cheng Yuan, Liu Dazhi, and Wu Gejianxiong, known as the “Changsha Three,” have been detained for about seven months. Established in 2016, Changsha Funeng mainly focused on disability rights and also the rights of disadvantaged groups. To understand more about the arrests, public interest work in China, and the challenges activists face working in this area, I interviewed Yang Zhanqing, co-founder of Changsha Funeng.

Dave Yin

on March 20, 2020

Dave Yin is a reporter and editor at Caixin Global, where he covers COVID-19, China policy, and technology. Before moving to China, he reported from Canada, the U.S., and France, and has covered foreign policy, societal issues, and tech. He studied journalism with a focus on international reporting at Carleton University and is also a photographer. He calls Toronto home.